Stellarium is a free software planetarium, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It uses OpenGL to render a realistic sky in real time. With Stellarium, it's possible to see what one cannot see with the naked eye, binoculars or a small telescope.
Stellarium is developed by the French programmer Fabien Chéreau, who launched the project in the summer of 2001. Other prominent developers include Robert Spearman, Johannes Gajdosik, Matthew Gates, Nigel Kerr and Johan Meuris, who is responsible for the artwork.
Stellarium was featured on Source Forge in May 2006 as Project of the Month.
In 2006, Stellarium 0.7.1 won a gold award in the Education category of the Les Trophées du Libre free software competition.
Stellarium contains a wide variety of features.
Sky features
§ over 600,000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue and the Tycho-2 Catalogue
§ extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
§ asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
§ constellations from ten cultures
§ images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
§ realistic Milky Way
§ very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
§ planets of the solar system and their major moons
§ ability to display stars and other celestial objects as seen from reference points other than the Earth (e.g. Saturn, Phobos, Comet McNaught or any other object defined in ssystem.ini)
Interface
§ zoom
§ time control
§ multilingual interface
§ scripting to record and playback shows
§ fisheye projection for planetarium domes
§ spheric mirror projection for personal domes
§ graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
§ telescope control
Visualization
§ equatorial and azimuthal grids
§ star twinkling
§ shooting stars
§ eclipse simulation
§ skinnable landscapes
§ spherical panorama projection
Customisability
§ Deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts etc can be added.
Spherical mirror distortion
The spherical mirror distortion feature allows Stellarium to be used in projection systems that utilize a digital video projector and a convex spherical to project images onto a dome. Such systems are cheaper than traditional planetarium projectors and fish-eye lens projectors and for that reason are used in budget and home planetarium setups. Several companies that build and sell digital planetarium systems, such as Digitalis Education Solutions and e-Planetarium, use Stellarium-based software in their products.
VirGO
VirGO is a Stellarium plugin, a visual browser for the European Southern Observatory Science Archive Facility that allows astronomers to browse professional astronomical data.
Stellarium for Java
Stellarium for Java is a Java fork or port of Stellarium, maintained by an independent team of developers, led by Jerome Beau. As of February 2009, the project is still in its alpha version, and the last commit in the SVN repository was made in October 2008.
(source :www.wikipedia.org)
If you wish download Stellarium free follow this link.
Stellarium official web page: www.stellarium.org
